North Wind (3 page)

The
funny
part was that the average Aleutian trader was no more ‘religious’ than your average human sinner. They went to church all right, because they were in the grip of a State religion. They weren’t
keen.
Maitri had a rare love of the records for their own sake, like someone having a passion for temple dancing or church music. But you could hear in his voice what he thought about Sid’s humble prayers. Alien says:
“Oh yes Sid, I’d love to come to the temple and make puja with you.”
Alien thinks:
how nice for them to have such childlike simple faith…

“Some of my proudest moments,” agreed the unregenerate Sid. “I would be honored to share them with you. Can we go back indoors now, sahib? I’m not achieving anything here.”

Maitri didn’t answer. “I wish I knew what the problem was,” he said, after a silence. “Is it the disk plant?”

The Aleutians, having secured this toehold in the north on the strength of the Mediterranean Pump, had started manufacturing “disks”—discrete energy-packs, Aleutian organic batteries, that looked like palm-sized cowpats but packed an amazing charge. This was against the rules. But the Government of the World had persuaded the Greeks to turn a blind eye: and in fact it had transpired that the aliens did hardly any trade. When Maitri had arrived a year ago, he’d been full of plans for livening the place up. He’d seen himself settling down for long chats with Sid and the Mycaenans, about the work of his favorite human clerics: the Rev. Wim Wenders, the Rev. John Huston, even the Very Rev. Miss Jane Austen, perhaps.

It was not to be. Lord Maitri had been forced to resign himself to the new order, to Total Quarantine Enforcement, and a complete absence of social contact with the locals. His interpreter, having nothing to interpret, had become the trading-post mascot. Life had settled into a dull routine, enlivened only by the arrival of a sick librarian. And then the world wide protests had started, spreading swiftly even to depopulated rural Greece.

Sid squatted back. “No,” he said wearily. “No one minds your contraband cowpats. Maitri,
you
know what the trouble is. It’s the Himalaya project. If you people agree to leave their bloody mountains alone, everything will be fine.”

“Bloody?” repeated Maitri absently. “Why ‘bloody’?” He made a gesture of dismissal. “It can’t be that. Don’t be silly. There must be something more.” He produced a bleak solution to the mystery. “I think you’ve never forgiven us, truly, for the Rape.”

Sidney Carton laughed. “Nobody remembers that old story.”

Maitri sighed. “I wish Clavel were here now.”

There was another silence. The alien’s dark eyes were blank, his attention turned inward.

“Thank you for being so kind to Goodlooking, by the way. Conditions here are hardly ideal for an isolate.”
Isolate
was not a term you would use when the librarian was about. Goodlooking could take it. He was a tough little person in his way. But who would want to know himself the cause of the flowering, deep inside, of yet another of the countless bruises life inflicted on that lonely and secret soul?

“Yudi has promised me a shuttle,” he announced.

Sid had resumed a desultory tapping, because he didn’t know what the alien wanted from him at this moment. Maitri had gone into a very Aleutian mode: crouched there in unreachable thoughts, coming out with these gnomic pronouncements.

“That’s good. When’s it due to arrive?”

The alien shrugged. “Yudisthara won’t let me down.”

He stood and held out his hands, palms open. Each lacked a little finger. The skin was loose and open-pored. His fingernails were the trimmed claws of a beast in clothes: a fairytale monster.

“We are different, but we are not so different. Your self understands mine. If it were not for the quarantine your chemical essence, your pheromones, would be mingling in the air with mine and telling me your news.
Aleutians go home?
Most Aleutians would prefer to go Home: if we knew the way. But I am not one of them Sid. I love this planet. I do not see why I should not stay.”

Abruptly he dropped to the ground and loped off, to survey the empty road with keen anxiety.

ΑΛΛΟΛΑΠΟΣ ΠΗΓ ΑΙΝΕΙΣ ΟΙΚΙΑ

It seemed as if the whole of the Argolid had dropped into a pit of silence. The limestone crags above the conifers glowed golden and indigo against the summer sky. Sid pulled off his trusty goggles and glowered at the scrawled Greek lettering, half-effaced by his chisel.
Aliens go home!
It was not a new idea. But in close on a century, it had never had so much support.

The first Aleutians had arrived on earth under the command of the Three Captains: Rajath the trickster, Clavel the poet—the one they called the Pure One—; and Kumbva the engineer. They were a small party of private adventurers. The world from which they came was a ship lost in space, a wandering hulk that had blundered into the solar system by chance. The people of Earth didn’t know that. They welcomed the visitors with delirious excitement, hailed them as superbeings, angels, saviors. Rajath the trickster had been quick to take advantage. He’d discovered that the “locals” believed his people had traveled instantaneously across the galaxy, from a fabulously advanced world of superbeings. He’d eagerly agreed that this was so. The nature and location of the shipworld out in orbit had become a closely guarded secret.

Then the aliens killed a human, and a terrifying standoff developed: terrifying to both parties, but again the humans didn’t know that. Rajath had bluffed his way through the emergency, and the “superbeings” seemed unassailable. Those few humans who saw the truth and dreaded the future were helpless. Meanwhile Clavel, the romantic young poet, had fallen in love with a local: a USSA journalist called Johnny Guglioli. Clavel believed that humans and Aleutians were one flesh, aspects of the same cosmic WorldSelf. He had recognized Johnny as his “trueparent,” his genetic twin born in the previous generation and therefore his perfect, fated lover. But Johnny loved Braemar Wilson, the secret leader of the anti-Aleutian resistance group called White Queen.

Johnny had refused to join “White Queen”; he was a friend to the aliens. But then Clavel tracked Johnny down and, overcome by passion, raped him. This incident loomed
huge
in the alien imagination, because, far as Sid could make out, of Clavel’s spotless reputation. It was hardly mentioned in the human records. But getting raped had changed Johnny’s mind. As you might expect…. He and Braemar Wilson had located the shipworld, somehow got themselves out there, and tried to blow up the aliens’ bluesun reactor. They might have succeeded, had not the infant Government of the World, freshly convened to deal with the aliens, found out what they were up to, and decided to blow the whistle.

Rightly or wrongly.

Johnny and Braemar had been caught. Johnny had been executed—a light sentence, in Aleutian terms, because they knew no death. Many of them
still
believed that “permanent death” was a childish superstition. Braemar, sent back to earth, had escaped from custody and died from unrelated causes a few years later. Thus ended the tragical romance of First Contact

After that, the Three Captains had vanished from command. A different set of aliens had made different terms with the Government of the World. They’d given up Rajath’s plans for large scale settlement, and settled for a network of Trading Posts, radiating from their established HQ, north of Thailand. It seemed they had no further ambitions.

If you listened to the Aleutians, thought Sid, you’d believe that the whole of Old Earth—by which they meant anywhere outside their trading network—had been pointlessly at war ever since. And they were mainly right.

He sat back, fists balled against his ruddy cheekbones, brooding on the stupid mess of recent human history.

It had started with the “Eve riots” of the twentyfirst century, when the downtrodden female masses of what was known as the Third World (a “world” that seemed to have enclaves everywhere) took to the streets, demanding more pay and better conditions for their labour. A global conference had convened, in Bangkok, to discuss the problem. It was not meant to achieve anything. It was supposed, like the notorious “Earth Summit” of the previous century, to be a brief indulgence for the bleeding-hearts, before a return to business as usual. Then the aliens arrived and decided, for reasons best known to themselves, to regard the World Conference On Women’s Affairs as the seat of planet earth’s government. Thereupon a whole package of worthy, virtuous reforms of human behaviour
including
a better deal for “biological females,” became known as The Women’s Agenda. After the sabotage crisis there was a backlash, and the Men’s Agenda emerged. The Men were the Traditionalists, and they included plenty of women who agreed that the traditional division of labour, responsibility and material wealth between the genders was natural and right.

It was more like a religious dispute than anything: dividing countries, continents, families—but only on the chattering and street-demo level. Then a European state called England took exception to the dire condition of an array of nuclear power stations positioned in easy radioactive-pluming distance from their south coast. The English weren’t notably Reformists. But this was a “Gender” issue, in the new terms. When the dispute became a shooting match, and then a conflagration that engulfed Europe, Northern Eurasia and parts of Africa, they called it the First Gender War.

Most humans of either party or biological gender hated the “Men versus Women” and the “Gender War” tags, but the names had stuck. By the time Sidney Carton was born, in England, the war in Europe had lasted for decades. After several false attempts at peace, there was no number attached anymore: it was just the war. The rhetoric was long exhausted, there was little to choose between the two sides. Everyone was poor and everyone felt cheated of the riches and comforts that had vanished. Sid remembered being hungry, and tired all the time. And he remembered being grimly grateful, though he rebelled against his own people constantly, that he did not have to join either faction of the vicious child-gangs that roamed his estate. He remembered understanding, from a very early age, that it was crazy to be a halfcaste, but it was better than being one of
them.

Sid’s people had moved south to the Enclaves, like many Old Earth “halfcastes,” in the quieter years when travel was just about possible. In the Enclaves, within the Aleutian trading territories, alien influence kept the Reformers and the Traditionalists from scrapping too openly, and the heretics who refused to have a gender were tolerated; though nobody liked them

While the human race was engrossed in the Gender War squabble, the Aleutian traders had been quietly prospering, almost unnoticed: until one day they announced the Himalaya project. They planned to set heavy-duty rock-munching microbes to level the peaks of the Himalaya ranges, thereby bringing refreshment to the climate of the Subcontinent. It would take a few years, they thought. Maybe less. It wasn’t the first Aleutian scheme of its kind, though it was the most ambitious. They seemed honestly amazed at the explosion of outrage that spread through the Enclaves and ignited Old Earth.

It wasn’t, they protested, as if the mountains were alive!

Everest, thought Sid.
Sagamartha. Mother of the Gods.
He lifted a handful of the storied dust of Greece, tissue of myth, seeds of soul, and crumbled it over his head. A world can be alive, without being saturated with the living cells of its sentient inhabitants. A world can be made sacred, by something other than biology. But the Aleutians would never understand that. Sid grimaced horribly, his sun-scoured features creasing inside their wrapping into a thousand premature wrinkles. The dust slithered from the coat of film that covered a shock of hair the color and texture of bleached straw. Actually he had no sympathy with the purebreds’ metaphysical angst. He didn’t see what was special about a meat (as it were) mountain. They were on digital record somewhere, surely. You could experience them anytime. Sid’s dread was practical.

The Aleutian technicians admitted that there’d be a disturbance of local weather systems, and a rise in the death rate: but nothing to notice, since there was a global war going on anyway. The effects would pass in a generation or two. The net gain in climate improvement was worth the cost.

In a generation or two…
Sid crouched with his arms wrapped around his knees. He thought of tons upon tons of rock and ice, shearing away. The skies filled with mountain-dust, the North Wind rushing down out of the cold desert. He thought of the footage he’d seen of life after the Japan Sea cataclysm: a marginal upheaval compared to this one. Some scientists feared that the inevitable “benign cooling” would tip the earth into a million years of winter. It hardly seemed to matter. Like a long drop, or deep water: after the first hundred whatevers, who’s counting? But the Aleutians didn’t understand that. They didn’t believe in permanent death.

A flock of sparrows flew down and started to scratch in the disturbed pipeline for food. They’d be lucky… The purebreds were such fools. They woke after a hundred years, and thought they could kick the aliens out, just like that. Sid watched the sparrows. What I would like, he thought, is to have a house of my own, with a garden, and live in it and provide for my family. I could grow vegetables. He wondered how long before an air-transport from Uji could get here.